The recent outage of the popular microblogging service that affected both its web and mobile versions took the company more than 6 hours to deal with. Twitter finally posted an update on its status page acknowledging that the intermittent issue was resolved and related to an internal code change. The company reverted the change, which fixed the issue.

First Twitter users reported blackouts at about 8.30am GMT on January 19. Then, timelines sporadically reappeared for some mobile users in a couple hours. Nevertheless, the service wasn’t fully functional, dropping back offline intermittently, with images and videos failing to load. According to statistics, this problem was the longest-lasting in the company’s decade-long history. It should be noted that its applications, including Tweetdeck, were also hit by interruptions in service that day. While blackouts were common for Twitter in the early days of the service, recently it was doing much better. For example, back in 2008, an Apple live event caused Twitter to crash under the weight of traffic, while in 2014 the major drop in service lasted for about 45 minutes.

Industry observers believe that the recent outage would not help Twitter’s image, but at the same time they admitted that the company should have no problem bouncing back. While any downtime for a technology brand is negative, users quickly forget it and return to their daily habits. They even said that a short-term outage only makes Twitter “more human.”